The Ruinous Sweep

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  He wondered if that would be true.

  They headed west, the fire over Donovan’s left shoulder and the highway on their right. So close — a few hundred yards away. And Ottawa was . . . what? Sixty or seventy miles east, at a guess. They were walking parallel to Seven, and he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why he didn’t just swerve off and take his chances out there, but he followed, like some tame creature on a rope. He imagined he’d get maybe twenty yards before her bullpup bit him, good and hard.

  There were cars on the highway by now, one every few minutes, with their headlights on in the gloaming. Commuters, he guessed, heading east to the city. He didn’t know what time it was and then realized he had his iPhone, at least partially charged, and surreptitiously pulled it from his pocket to check. It was at 30 percent but there were no bars — none at all. Somehow he was not surprised; as if there was likely to be any communication in a swamp. It was five o’clock. He’d been up something over twenty hours. In no other twenty-hour period of his life, short of being born, had so much happened.

  Meanwhile, Jilly trudged on ahead with her sci-fi shooter flapping against her bulging backpack. “Damned one-percenters,” she muttered.

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “The Pagans: a pack of one-percenters.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Ninety-nine percent of bikers are law-abiding citizens.”

  She didn’t go on, but Donovan wasn’t quite so numb with tiredness that he couldn’t do the math. In fact, he didn’t feel as tired as he had earlier. He was so far beyond the Pleasant Land of Tired that the idea of it didn’t really compute. He also noticed that his foot didn’t hurt anymore. Maybe he was high from exposure to all that weed. He sniffed the air. Soon all of the county would be.

  “Didn’t you tell me that Mervin was your brother?”

  “I did.”

  “So . . .” he said and let the single word just float there to see if she could guess where he was going with it.

  She stopped. Leaned against a tree and turned to look at him. “Mervin and the others — they can look after themselves.”

  “But all that gunfire.”

  She shrugged. “The Pagans like to make a lot of noise. Mervin isn’t all that smart — I inherited all the brains in the family — but he’s got enough horse sense to lie low.”

  Donovan looked back toward the homestead. The fire was burning itself out: a low glowing on the horizon, like a false sunrise with dark angles, black sticks where walls had once stood. How low would Mervin have had to go?

  Jilly turned westward again, swinging her right arm in a wide circle to wave him on. “Westward ho the wagons,” she said. “Pick it up, kid.”

  But he didn’t. Maybe I’ll just stand here and become a tree, he thought. Grow some leaves. How hard could it be?

  “Move it!” she shouted.

  After a while they stepped out of the submerged land onto more solid ground. The way ahead rose toward a bare hill, and soon enough they had cleared the drunken forest, though not without having to make their way through prickly ash that tore at their clothes and, finding flesh underneath, seemed all the more determined to feed on his blood. Jilly seemed oblivious of the thorns. Oblivious of anything but her task. And it seemed he was her task. His guide.

  They stood in a field of wild grass, new growth coming up between the gray, winter-weathered stalks. The hill was laced with low-slung juniper bushes. Juniper. He remembered juniper, but it was a dim memory at best. He saw a berry amid the green and picked it. He rolled it in his fingers and sniffed it. Gin. It smelled like gin. A memory came to him of smelling that smell for the first time. Not the drink, the berries. He looked up at the woman marching on ahead. He seemed to remember her being there, too, just like this, leading the way. How could that be?

  “Come on, Dono,” she said. She pointed up the hill and on they stomped, at a brisker pace, until they reached the top and stared down on a wooded vale and a dark river. The trees were not yet dressed, but there were buds on every branch.

  “Is that Mordor?” Donovan asked.

  “What?”

  “You know, where we throw the ring into the fires of the crack of doom?”

  Jilly didn’t seem to know what he was talking about. Or maybe, he thought, she just didn’t have a sense of humor. Either way, Donovan shrugged and shut up. They headed down and soon found themselves walking through a grove of low and gnarled trees. Apple trees. An orchard, but abandoned, by the look of the underbrush. A few apples clung to the branches, blackened and shriveled. No Eden, that’s for sure.

  At the river’s edge, Jilly finally sat down and, grateful, Donovan joined her, groaning as he stretched out each leg in front of him.

  “I guess you only look like you’re in good shape,” she said.

  He wanted to say he was in great shape for slapping a ball over the left field wall or running from third to home, but even as the words occurred to him, the thought of home blossomed in his head and then just as quickly shriveled like a dead apple. The thought of it plugged up his throat. She leaned over and patted his knee. People kept doing that. “I didn’t mean nothing by it,” she said. “I know what you’ve been through.”

  Behind them, the sun was rising. It hadn’t made it over the hill, but there was already some warmth in the air. And smoke. “I’m sorry,” he said, “about . . . you know . . .”

  “My house burning down?” He nodded. She shrugged. “Happens,” she said. He gazed at her, not sure he could have heard her right. “It’s whatever it takes,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “To get you here,” she said. “It’s never easy.”

  “Oh,” he said. It was no kind of answer. She glanced at him and something in her eyes warned him off: you don’t want to go there, her eyes seemed to say. So he turned away and stared at the river, a whole other kind of water than what they’d journeyed through in the swamp, alive and moving.

  “What do we do now?” he said.

  “We wait,” said Jilly.

  She was staring across the river. Donovan saw smoke rising in a thin stream up into the lit air. Smoke from a chimney. And sure enough, he caught sight of a small house through the foliage on the other shore. No lights but a telltale shimmer of reflected sun on a window. Every sane person was still asleep. The low hills across the river were deeply wooded, but there were other houses, now that he adjusted his gaze, here and there, indeterminate in shadow. Cottages, from what he could tell, ramshackle.

  “The dog will probably see us first,” said Jilly.

  Donovan inspected the other shoreline, about a fly ball to shallow center field away. He didn’t see any dog. He didn’t see anyone up and about. It was . . . he checked his cell phone. Six thirty.

  “Where are we?” he said.

  “Off the grid,” she said, eyeing his phone with a wry expression. He tucked it back in his pocket and then decided to roll up his pant legs and see what damage the prickly ash had done — see if he’d picked up any blood-sucking travel companions.

  “It’s an island,” she said, tilting her chin toward the far shore. “The river is like a moat.”

  There should have been something to say to this. But after opening several compartments in his brain and finding them empty, Donovan went back to examining his bloodied calves. He was tracing a long scratch on his left shin when it occurred to him what this river was. This is where you crossed over, left behind the land of the living. He looked up at the island across the dark water. It didn’t look like hell. He looked down again at his bloodied legs. “Is this it?” he said to himself, and he was about to ask Jilly when he heard barking.

  Jilly smiled. “Told you.” She pointed to a black dog dancing on the other shore, barking his fool head off. “Minos,” she added, waving to the dog, who immediately turned tail and raced up into the woods. Jilly got to her feet and slapped the grass off her butt. Donovan stared up at her.

  “Cha
rlie’s dog,” she said.

  “Right,” said Donovan. “Of course.”

  Charlie came to them on a boat with Minos sitting in the bow. It was a wide-bellied rowboat, long and wooden, and Donovan thought he’d seen one like it somewhere but he couldn’t think where. Then he remembered: it was Ratty’s boat in The Wind in the Willows. His mother loved that book and she read it a lot, and he had a feeling he liked it because he liked who she was when she read it to him.

  It had taken the dog long enough to wake his master. The sun was peeking above the hill behind Donovan and Jilly by the time Charlie launched his craft and began to make his way across the water toward them. As the boat pulled free of the shadow of the willows that lined the other side, Donovan saw that there was a kind of figurehead on the front of the rowboat — a skull. Nice.

  Charlie was dressed in a wrinkled shirt. His sleeves were rolled up to reveal strong forearms working the oars rhythmically. His shirt had once been blue, by the look of it, but had been sun dyed, like his torn jeans that held about as much blue in them as the early morning sky. His feet were bare, as if it were July not April. Bare and very white. If his clothes had seen too much sun, Charlie didn’t seem to have seen any; his skin looked like marble, all the more so for the shock of long, dark, unruly hair that crowned him King of the River.

  There was a current. It was deceiving, and Charlie was such a good oarsman he seemed to navigate it without any trouble, but it was there all the same. Donovan watched a branch float by the boat, heading south at quite a clip. Not a river you’d want to swim across. Donovan couldn’t help checking out his options. He wasn’t exactly chained up in leg irons, but running was about the last thing he could think of doing. For now anyway. Jilly looked at him and smiled. Her smile was a kind of leg iron, come to think of it.

  Charlie was strong, loose-limbed. With one last heave, he lifted his oars from the water and smiled over his shoulder at Jilly as the boat bumped up on the mud of the east bank.

  “You are a sight for sore eyes,” he said. He didn’t even seem to notice Donovan, and when Donovan looked sideways at Jilly he saw a blush creep up her neck and her cheeks.

  Before the raft had even made land, Minos leaped out, landing in the water, then racing up the bank to run in mad circles around Jilly, barking and wagging his tail and shaking the wet out of him. Donovan stepped back. He’d never much liked dogs. Especially big, noisy, black dogs.

  Minos didn’t seem to notice him any more than Charlie did. Meanwhile, the dog’s master had jumped ashore, his white feet squelching in the mud. He wore wooden beads around his neck. He was handsome but for the pallor of his skin. And though his hair was so black it had a bluish sheen, his chin was remarkably clear of stubble. Unnaturally smooth, like porcelain.

  Jilly reached down and tugged him two-handed up the grassy bank and into her arms. Donovan watched them embrace before deciding to look at something else — anything else. There was certainly lots of time for a good look around. He resisted the urge to cough. Meanwhile, the dog sat at Jilly’s side, his tongue lolling, barking now and then between affectionate whimpers as if to say, I’ve missed you, too, I’ve missed you, too!

  “Long time no see,” said Charlie, finally pulling himself away. “I saw the smoke on the way down.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Jilly, as if her farm burned down on a regular basis. Was that what she meant when she’d said “Happens”?

  The smile on Charlie’s face lessened a few watts. “You okay?”

  She nodded. “I’m alive,” she said, sounding as if it weren’t so much a miracle as a burden.

  “The Pagans?”

  “Who else.”

  His shook his head as if she’d said they were having trouble with mice again. Then he turned his gaze on Donovan, and the gravity of his expression deepened, as if this stranger had only just materialized there and his presence had something to do with Jilly’s misfortunes. Which Donovan had to admit was true.

  “And you are?”

  “Donovan.” He was going to say his last name but stopped.

  Charlie nodded by way of a greeting, not offering his name let alone his hand. But his arm pulled Jilly closer, in a proprietary way that made Donovan want to say, Listen, Charlie — if that’s your real name — I never touched her!

  The ferryman turned his full attention back to her. He did not let her go but, having glanced back over her shoulder toward the hill, she gently but firmly disentangled herself from his arms. “We should get moving,” she said. It was the first time Donovan had thought that she was truly afraid the Pagans might be on their tail.

  Charlie nodded. Then he peeked at the backpack. “That looks serious.”

  She nodded, smiled. “Yeah. And there’s a little something from me, as well.” She took her assault rifle off her back and handed it to Charlie while she slipped out of her backpack. Then she exchanged the pack for the gun. He took it in both hands.

  He placed it on the ground, flipped the top back, and pulled out a fistful of bills. He nodded. Glanced at Donovan with a more kindly expression on his face. “This ought to do,” he said.

  “Go deep,” she said. So he dug his arm down through the money until he reached the bottom of the pack. Slowly, carefully, he dragged out his find and held it up to the light. It looked to Donovan like a dime bag of weed. “Nice,” said Charlie, elongating the vowel tenderly.

  “It sure ain’t schwag,” said Jilly. “For you, only top-shelf. Aged. Very smooth.” She strapped her weapon on her back, stared again up the hill, then glanced at Donovan with an expression he couldn’t read. The closest he could get was, What? You’re still here? Something in him made him step back as if she were releasing him, but then her expression changed again and she shook her head slowly, back and forth. So he checked his movement, gave up yet again. There was a whole lot of giving up happening. It wasn’t like him. He was usually the one who marched up and down the dugout urging on his teammates when they were behind, even if it was the bottom of the ninth. He wasn’t sure what inning he was in anymore.

  Charlie held the baggie for the dog to sniff. Minos barked excitedly and wagged his tail, which made Jilly laugh, despite her now obvious unease. Donovan watched her glance anxiously up the hill again. She patted the dog’s shiny black head. “Good dog,” she said.

  Donovan felt like a third wheel. Here was this happy family celebrating the return home of Mommy with the groceries — not to mention tens of thousands of dollars — and he was just . . . what? Nobody. Next to invisible. Unwanted on the voyage. He looked back longingly, not toward the farm but northward. If all Jilly could picture on the other side of the hill was marauding gangbangers, Donovan saw a new day dawning. Across that hill, now sleek with sunshine, and through the swampy forest was the highway to home. The clouds were clearing; the day might get hot, or at least good and warm. He could walk a bit and his clothes would dry and then he could try hitching or call Bee as soon as he got some bars and she could come and get him.

  “Hey!” Jilly was staring at him. By now, without really knowing it, he’d backed off a long way. “Where you think you’re going?” He shrugged. She swung the assault rifle around and pointed it at him. He threw up his hands, shocked to fully realize what he should have known all along: he was her prisoner. “Come here,” she said.

  “You don’t need me. I’m just —”

  “No, you’re not,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re staying.”

  “But why?”

  She stared at Charlie, who shook his head with a disgusted look on his face, as if to say, Some people just don’t get it. Then Minos, who had been sitting obediently at his master’s feet, jumped up and came barreling toward Donovan and raced around him again and again and again, as if wrapping him up in rope.

  “You see, man?” said Charlie. “The dog wants you to stay.”

  Donovan stared at Jilly, dumbfounded. She had pointed the gun at him. He’d thought they were . . . well, he wasn’t sure what he’d tho
ught. Maybe not friends, but . . . And she’d done that to him as if she were delivering the merchandise, nothing more. He squinted, his mouth open in an unasked question, and watched as the hard look on her face turned into an expression of the deepest sympathy. “Sorry,” she mouthed. And in her face now, he understood something: the hardness was how she got through this.

  There was a village among the trees. No paved roads to speak of, just tire tracks through the grass, trails and paths, some paved with stones set in sand. Handmade houses. Creations of the wood-butcher’s art, nestled in leafy glades, crouching in ferny hollows, shot through with light from the rising sun. There were hand-carved or painted signs over some of the doorways: THE SECOND CIRCLE, FRANCESCA’S END, LOWER LIMBO. On the road nearest the river, several of the buildings were boarded up; summer homes, Donovan guessed. But as they walked the curving, rutted road up the hill, they passed a dome and a resurrected barn, a house built around a giant bark-stripped tree. Houses of salvage, chicken wire and tin, slate and off-cut lumber. Crouching houses, leaping houses on stilts, houses covered with hand-sewn canvas and sapling ribs. Houses made of train ties and fieldstone and junkyard mismatched windows.

  If he was dead, he didn’t feel any different — any less alive — than he’d felt for the last umpteen hours. When would that happen, he wondered? And the answer came to him unbidden: when he felt nothing at all.

  This place — he felt it, all right. If it was a dream, it was one he’d had before. He had been here and was here again.

  Despite the birdsong and the growing warmth, he shuddered. A colony of improbable cabins set in the woods against a backdrop of a steep cliff. From the water he had eyed that sandstone cliff above the treetops, the yellow rock face warming in the sun. There had to be a way up to the top. If he could get away, he’d find a path. Up there, surely there would be a signal. But he would have to pack that thought away for later, when and if he could recover enough energy for such a venture. For now there was just this sleepy village and a body that had never felt so bone weary, one he felt that he was carrying around like excess baggage rather than living in it.